Richard Falk

Richard Falk is an international law and international relations scholar who taught at Princeton University for forty years. Since 2002 he has lived in Santa Barbara, California, and taught at the local campus of the University of California in Global and International Studies and since 2005 chaired the Board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. In 2008, he was appointed the UN's special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories

Richard Falk, UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories and world-renowned legal scholar, argues that despite the silence from Western media and politicians, the extraordinary hunger strike by Palestinian prisoners marks a dramatic shift in Palestinian tactics of resistance.

The findings of the UN's Palmer report, published last month, on Israel's attack on the Gaza Flotilla, have triggered an unprecedented fallout between the Turkish and Israeli governments. In an exclusive new essay, the UN's special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories, renowned academic and legal expert Richard Falk, gives his verdict on the report.